dammit goog! all you had to do was integrate seamless fail over to SMS (iMessage style) and it would have been a no brainer... now it's just another 'alternative' messaging network i cant convince my friends to switch to.

There are 5 - 7 million wp8 devices sold world wide. That's a lot of people to just skip over.

Unfortunately, there are 1.5 million Android activations per day as of 2013 (and this is before the GS4 came out). Google probably isn't interested in the all of 5 days worth of users when it'll probably take longer that to port a well-written version over.

As for Hangouts, I'm disappointed in no SMS integration. I'll be using this since it supplants Talk but it could have taken on everything from Whatsapp to iMessage.

The link to the play store is there but is not currently working so Android users have to wait a bit longer. I've installed the chrome extension and one of the features I was most looking for, integration with G+ messenger, is absent. I'm hoping it is just part of the rollout.

Edit: It's 2:30 central time and the app is now also available on Google Play. That covers all of the announced platforms.

Yeah, making it a Chrome extension kinda sucks. If they had updated the forgotten Talk app, I'd have been all over this. Have to play around with the extension when I get home, but I have a feeling I'll need to stick with Trillian.

Disappointed in lack of Windows Phone/RT support. Hangout are far superior to Skype in a lot of ways.

Seems Google is determined to drive me from their stack by not supporting devices I actually own.

You bought into a minority platform run by the competition, and have obviously turned your nose up at the web interface. This seems less like you being driven away, and more like you walking away.

Google really should have seized the opportunity to integrate SMS & Voice into Hangouts. This is a bad sign about Voice' longevity, and means Hangouts is going to be useless outside of little niches.

Or, at the time he bought in to his platform, he felt MS had the best options for communication for his need. Now he sees that google offers something that might be useful he is disappointed that google doesn't offer it.

Google has been successful because of their services. Limiting their services to a specific platform is a Microsoft strategy that worked well for a while but is coming back to bite them in the ass, in-part because of all the animosity it created with consumers.

If Google uses this tactic occasionally they will probably be pretty successful with it. However, with the animosity between them and MS, it looks like it could very well become their strategy which will hurt them in the long run, just as it has MS.

Hangouts will now allow users to archive chats as they have been able to do with Google Talk. Google described the conversations as "long-lasting" and compared them to being in the same room with your conversation partners. Hangouts includes photo sharing and a new extended collection of emoticons and other graphic message elements, elements that will be archived alongside text.

You are saying about the web interface. IF the web interface is such a big thing then why is google ignoring windows phone 8 ? You can develop windows phone 8 apps using html 5.

Will you WP8/MS people not hijack this thread please? We had to put up for several months how your phones were smoother and better than Android phones. Enough already.

Back on topic.- Ignoring Google Voice integration means Voice is going the way of Reader- Weird that it is not SMS backed like imessage is. Weirder still that it JUST got the ability to send gifs? I send videos via imessage regularly.

Disappointed in lack of Windows Phone/RT support. Hangout are far superior to Skype in a lot of ways.

Seems Google is determined to drive me from their stack by not supporting devices I actually own.

You bought into a minority platform run by the competition, and have obviously turned your nose up at the web interface. This seems less like you being driven away, and more like you walking away.

Google really should have seized the opportunity to integrate SMS & Voice into Hangouts. This is a bad sign about Voice' longevity, and means Hangouts is going to be useless outside of little niches.

Or, at the time he bought in to his platform, he felt MS had the best options for communication for his need. Now he sees that google offers something that might be useful he is disappointed that google doesn't offer it.

Google has been successful because of their services. Limiting their services to a specific platform is a Microsoft strategy that worked well for a while but is coming back to bite them in the ass, in-part because of all the animosity it created with consumers.

If Google uses this tactic occasionally they will probably be pretty successful with it. However, with the animosity between them and MS, it looks like it could very well become their strategy which will hurt them in the long run, just as it has MS.

Google also say one thing and do the other. They just bought up how Microsoft integrated google talk with outlook.com but wont let them integrate Skype Yet google is the one trying their hardest to block windows phone 8 users from their services.

"Google has created a single common video and text chat platform that spans Android, Web, and iOS clients—and a true competitor to Apple’s iMessenger and FaceTime platform"

LOL, iMessage and Facetime only work on Apple devices, how are they even in the conversation, let alone called out in this article?

You're right, the two are not really comparable. We gave this phrase the heave-ho. Apologies!

Thanks, it's tiring trying to try to keep the Apple bias out of news articles these days, glad to see a quick acknowledgement. Too funny that my comment got voted down -4 when the author agrees with my post...says a lot about Ars posters.

I downloaded and played around it with a bit on my iPhone. It made me sign for Google+ which I didn't want. The interface is very Google-y but a bit rough around the edges.

The Google+ requirement kind of ruins it for me though. Interoperability with Google Talk is big but it's still fundamentally Google+ Messenger.

not sure if you heard - Google is Google + so ... we should expect that at some point using Google services will require a G+ account... Just like you have to actually sign up for facebook to use facebook...

What is "Something that's perfectly acceptable to do in a piece of software, but makes you an asshole if you done in real life."

You may not explicitly write it down on a piece of paper, but I'm sure you do this at some level with your current group of friends. You have very close friends to whom you can say anything, and with whom you'll go out at a moment's notice; you have good friends who you'll invite to a party, and perhaps you'll hang out with them once or twice a month; you have acquaintances who you see at social functions and while you generally like them, if they called on a random day of the week you might make up an excuse because you don't feel like going out that night.

We all rank our friends and family at some level. It's how we cope with social hierarchies.

In other words - with some people you don't mind sharing stories of your recent family vacation, but you'd never tell them that you're a Brony.

I downloaded and played around it with a bit on my iPhone. It made me sign for Google+ which I didn't want. The interface is very Google-y but a bit rough around the edges.

The Google+ requirement kind of ruins it for me though. Interoperability with Google Talk is big but it's still fundamentally Google+ Messenger.

not sure if you heard - Google is Google + so ... we should expect that at some point using Google services will require a G+ account... Just like you have to actually sign up for facebook to use facebook...

I am just saying, people aren't going to use Hangout for the same reason people haven't been using Google+. People don't want another social network. Even one with better features. I don't think Hangout will be enough to get those Google Talk users to convert.

Disappointed in lack of Windows Phone/RT support. Hangout are far superior to Skype in a lot of ways.

Seems Google is determined to drive me from their stack by not supporting devices I actually own.

You bought into a minority platform run by the competition, and have obviously turned your nose up at the web interface. This seems less like you being driven away, and more like you walking away.

WP8 and RT have great HTML5 support. If Google were actually interested in the open web and not their stack's version of it, this wouldn't be a problem. But everything's a plugin, Chrome extension, or (previously)Webkit-only extension. For all of Google's noise about blaming MS for bad interop, they're the ones cutting EAS and CalDAV, developing against their own browser engine, and apparently neglecting Voice in all this.

I see interop failures all over the place, and not just from Microsoft.

Disappointed in lack of Windows Phone/RT support. Hangouts are far superior to Skype in a lot of ways.

Seems Google is determined to drive me from their stack by not supporting devices I actually own.

edit: spelling

I previously owned a windows phone and my only question is "who owns a windows phone?". Isn't the Facebook app on wp developed by Microsoft and not Facebook?

Of course Skype has better support, its owned by Microsoft..

A lot of people. IF nokia keeps being successful in the lower end smartphone market a lot more people will own windows phone 8 smartphones. A lot of people who do not use computers that much who will be brought up on bing instead of google. Google is doing exactly what its ceo stated they didn't want to do in this keynote.

He just spoke for a half hour on openness yet do not want to use these same standards to build windows phone 8 apps.

You are saying about the web interface. IF the web interface is such a big thing then why is google ignoring windows phone 8 ? You can develop windows phone 8 apps using html 5.

I do not wish to argue but if you are asking an honest question here is the answer: Google has developed a universal app via their web interface. Platforms that have lots of users are worth the investment of a native app. Platforms like WP8 simply do not (yet?) have enough users for Google to count it worth the investment.

Or, at the time he bought in to his platform, he felt MS had the best options for communication for his need. Now he sees that google offers something that might be useful he is disappointed that google doesn't offer it.

Google has been successful because of their services. Limiting their services to a specific platform is a Microsoft strategy that worked well for a while but is coming back to bite them in the ass, in-part because of all the animosity it created with consumers.

If Google uses this tactic occasionally they will probably be pretty successful with it. However, with the animosity between them and MS, it looks like it could very well become their strategy which will hurt them in the long run, just as it has MS.

I suppose his choice of OS could have just been uninformed as you say. But, that still hardly makes it Google's fault.

I do not really understand your line of reasoning. The only platform Google is truly limiting themselves to is the web. They have many many web-only apps. Frequently they offer native experiences in addition to the web interface. But, at the very least you always have a full blown web app, and sometimes it has even more features than the native one.

Remember even Google has finite resources and must count the cost. Unless you are interested in wasting money, you have to make sure a platform has users before investing in it. Think of all the operating systems that have come and gone in recent years, The Blackberry Storm one, WebOS, Windows CE... and those are just the popular ones off the top of my head. There were a lot more.